A high-level panel of local health professionals explores how doctors can do a better job of treating patients and increasing the quality of health care, especially as the Affordable Care Act comes into play.

John Adler

Lisa Aliferis

For the past decade, Lisa Aliferis has specialized in producing medical reports for television, most recently at Dateline NBC. She also produced health reports for five years at KPIX-TV in San Francisco. As a 1996 Kaiser Family Foundation Media Fellow, Aliferis examined issues related to end-of-life care. She spent months documenting the stories of three families and whose loved ones were hospitalized in an intensive care unit; the families struggled along with doctors in deciding how far to go with aggressive medical treatment. Aliferis is a graduate of Brown University.

Robert M. Pearl

Dr. Robert Pearl is Executive Director and CEO of The Permanente Medical Group.
Board certified in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Dr. Pearl received his MD from Yale University School of Medicine. He completed his residency in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Stanford University where he has been a faculty member since 1978. In addition to being Clinical Professor of Plastic Surgery, Dr. Pearl served as the Residency Director of Stanford's Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery program from 1984 to 1990. He is the current director of Stanford University School of Medicine's nationally recognized review course on Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

Victoria Sweet

Dr. Sweet is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in history. She practiced medicine for twenty years at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, where she began writing her recent book, 'God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine' (Riverhead, 2012).

Dr. Victoria Sweet, Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, discusses the roles patients play in the healthcare ecosystem, and she asserts why it's difficult to change human behavior.